New horror project: day sixteen writing

We got our heroes into the crazy old lady’s house, learned her radio isn’t working, got her Daddy’s old 1940’s pickup running, and have escaped just as the creatures attack.

Now we’re on the road down off the mountain.

Interestingly, a point of contention has been whether or not one could even get an old 1940’s truck that’s been in storage for 60 years to start. I’m of the camp that says “weirder things have happened” — both in this script and in other stories. Seriously, the woods are full of strange semi-mythical beasties and we’re concerned over whether it’s realistic for an old truck to start up? Sean has long since become less critical of the idea. But in deference to Sean (and other similarly critical readers) we’ve long ago agreed that we’d infer the COL (Crazy Old Lady) has been keeping the truck running in hopes her Daddy might come home. We gave her a line (“I’m not allowed to drive, but Daddy lets me start his truck every morning.”) and we’ll dress out the garage with some oil cans and a gas can.

We keep thinking we’re past any real subtext, then finding ourselves in a scene where someone has a secret or a secret is revealed… takes lots longer to suss out those scenes, to keep that dialogue ringing true, and still keep the pacing up where it needs to be at this point. It’s essentially an action sequence, but every line still comes from a character whose backstory and emotional profile has been pretty well defined, so we can’t get away with any lazy writing.

Which is fine — we’d rather be writing a hard story about complex characters than spewing out something cardboard and easy.